It’s that time of year again. We are onsite, announcing leadership positions for the Grade 7 girls, looking back – already – on successful events like Meet the Teachers and Summer Splash, marvelling at the competence of our Grade 0s, and forgetting the newness of the staff who have only just joined us. The PA AGM – conducted online under the energetic leadership of Malvern Chirume and his team – is behind us, the 2022 class reps, led by convenor Gugu Zulu, have met, and identified their objectives for 2022, and… what would a new year be without our tackling the problem of congestion in the parking lot?

The mood on campus is optimistic as we begin to conceive of a world that includes spectators and audiences, and the deliberate but joyous restoration of community. This is the message and mandate of the PA and the class reps: to bring us together and build relationships across the school.

Over the past fortnight, Di Gordon and I have spent time meeting girls and their parents for entry into Grade 0 2023. It is a wonderful thing to see our school through the eyes of prospective families, to be jolted into appreciation of our beautiful, busy campus with its vibrant population of friendly pupils and staff. Speaking about the school, practically and philosophically, to people who do not yet inhabit it, is an exercise in humility and a timely resetting of perspective: our preoccupation with what needs fixing recedes and what we have comes into full view: all the rich possibilities that lie ahead of us at this time, in this place.

The annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jnr’s birthday on the third Monday of January brings him and his words to mind at the beginning of every Easter Term; the line I quoted from an address he gave in Washington in 1968 at Meet the Teachers bears repeating here: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Teaching our girls, showing them the difference between today’s setbacks and tomorrow’s possibilities is part of our duty of care – a duty that is more urgent than ever as we emerge from the strangely straitened existence imposed on us by the pandemic.

My thanks, as always, to the teachers for making the girls feel at home on campus, to Revd Rakgadi for opening the doors of the chapel wide enough to hold several grades at once, and to the parents for walking alongside us, and your children, as we enter a new year. Special thanks from me and Ms Elk for supporting the inaugural birthday book initiative, our newest tradition in the Junior School.

As 2021’s pantone “colors of the year” – dependable and warm Ultimate Gray and Illuminating – make way for “the carefree confidence and daring curiosity” of this year’s Very Peri (PANTONE 17-3938), a unique shade of purple, we are encouraged to embrace an altered landscape of possibilities, “opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives”. Or, in our more modest, St Mary’s idiom, “Join us, please”.

SARAH WARNER
JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS